IN MOONLAND

Miles Allinson SCRIBE, RRP $29.99

At a time when his marriage appears to be falling apart, Joe goes in search of a father he barely knew, another broken man who seemingly committed suicide in the mid1990s. As a child, Joe remembers hearing snippets about Vincent’s life before marriage and children that he cannot reconcile with the man he knew, so he tries to prise the story out of his mother and his dad’s old friends. A story is eventually revealed, but only partially, of a man who was a strange mixture of good humour and violence, a man who in the 1970s took that well-trodden hippie trail to India in search of a guru. Vincent discovers that while there are many roads to Utopia, few, if any, reach the destination. This story of three generations is beautifully told and heart rending in its accumulation of losses that can never be retrieved and dreams that can never be realised.